The term “security theater” has a specific meaning which is not a bug or less than perfect protection: per its creator, “Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security.”

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/beyond_securi...

Public Relay is obviously not accurately described by that term and any rule which classifies it as such would be useless because it would classify all browser security as theater because everyone has had bugs, and everyone has had to adopt more sophisticated defenses to counter more sophisticated attackers.

Built in tracker blocking and the various ways Safari makes it hard to share user sessions with 3rd parties absolutely has real effect. It also has real costs: part of Safari’s poor compatibility reputation comes from websites that are broken by its tracking prevention features. This is why Google claims they haven’t rolled out the same. If Apple only cared about the problem at a superficial level, why wouldn’t they do the same as Chrome and talk a big game about the problem but continuously delay changes?

I’d say the privacy report is the only real false security feature, but Apple was a laggard in that market. For all we know, they could have been trying to match features with Ghostery or Brave that teach consumers this is a feature you should expect from your browser. Users may also have been needed education about that behavior in order to justify the compatibility regressions cookie blocking incurs. It’s impossible to know from the outside, but your body of evidence to support a really strong accusation is quite weak.

"Please note that this leak only occurs with iCloud Private Relay on iOS 15"

All software has bugs. I think it is more interesting to see how companies respond to reported issues. And how they improve things.

Is OpenSSL "theatre" because it had (bad!) bugs in the past?

Do you have something more recent than a leak from over 2 years ago that has long been fixed? I'm curious why iCloud Private Relay is theatre at the moment.